The Third Amendment limits the federal government’s ability to use private homes as lodging for soldiers. The Supreme Court has never decided a case directly implicating the Third Amendment and has cited it only in a handful of opinions.1 As a result, some legal scholars consider the Amendment to be “an interesting study in constitutional obsolescence.” 2 When ratified, however, the Third Amendment enshrined “protections of great importance,” 3 reflecting the Founders’ pre-Revolutionary experiences with British soldiers and centuries of English history.4

Despite the Amendment’s near-disuse as to its original protections,5 it took on a new dimension in the second half of the twentieth century, with courts and scholars citing it as one of the constitutional “guarantees creat[ing] zones of privacy” 6 and for a “traditional and strong resistance of Americans to any military intrusion into civilian affairs.” 7

Footnotes

1

See infra Amdt3.3 Government Intrusion and Third Amendment.

2

Morton J. Horwitz, Is the Third Amendment Obsolete?, 26 Val. Univ. L. Rev. 209, 212 (1991); accord William S. Fields & David T. Hardy, The Third Amendment and the Issue of the Maintenance of Standing Armies: A Legal History, 35 Am. J. Legal Hist. 393, 393 (1991).

3

Fields & Hardy, supra note 2, at 394.

4

See infra Amdt3.2 Historical Background on Third Amendment.

5

Contra Engblom v. Carey, 677 F.2d 957 (2d Cir. 1982).

6

Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479, 484 (1965); see also Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 350 n.5 (1967).

7

Laird v. Tatum, 408 U.S. 1, 15 (1972); see Amdt3.3 Government Intrusion and Third Amendment.